My epiphany about eating and weight loss (pretty long)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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About a year ago, my A1C rose from pre-diabetic, usually around 6.0 to 6.2, to diabetic at 6.6. This, combined with a previous episode of atrial flutter (which was corrected) jolted me into the realization that I could not continue the eating habits of nearly a lifetime without cutting my lifetime and the enjoyment thereof shorter than I would like. This was not the epiphany of which I write, however.

In the past year I have lost about 18% of my body weight, without chemical help and without counting anything. Somehow, and after some trial and error about what works for me, I have improved my food intake amount and quality such that for the past 6 months I have been losing at the rate of about 1.5 pounds a week, reduced my A1C back down to 6.0, and reduced my BMI to below 40 (obese instead of severely obese). It was during this process of trial and error, and thinking about why I was able to do this for this long, that I had some realizations about why diets haven’t worked for me, especially not in the long term. (By the way, I am not supposing I am the first person to have ever had these thoughts, just that it was a first for me.)

When counting calories, the emphasis is on how many calories you are allowed to consume, and when you reach that maximum, you are supposed to stop. Every day you are counting calories, you are focused on how much more you are allowed to eat, and things you are missing out on (at least I always did) instead of what kind and amount of food your body needs. A focus on calories consumed is not, I am convinced, a useful approach for me.

Instead of that path, this time I decided a few things, among which are: I could certainly eat smaller and healthier meals and be satisfied with them; I could manage with far fewer between-meal snacks, and especially without processed food and/or carb-based snacks; I could stand to be a little hungry now and then; I don’t ever need to eat another dessert or pastry; these changes will be permanent. I have ended up not thinking about things I am missing out on – with my metabolism I just can’t afford to eat them, and I have realized that all those sweets never brought me as much joy as grief in the long run. I honestly just don’t miss them. I’m not sure exactly how I got to this frame of mind, but it makes the kind of weight loss I have been doing possible for me.

Exercise: while I have gotten more active as I have lost weight, I have not (yet) started an exercise program; when I do, it will be to keep myself in better shape as I grow older, and not to lose weight. Goals: I didn’t have a goal (being superstitious about goals) when I started, but I do now – if I can lose a total of 33% of my original body weight (i.e. another 15% added to the 18% I have already lost) my BMI will be below 30, and I will officially not be obese any more. When I reach that goal, I will continue what I am doing now (“these changes will be permanent”), and maybe I will continue to lose a little more, slowly, and that’s okay. I don’t think losing too much weight is likely to be a problem.

As far as all of this goes, I don’t hold myself up as anything except lucky (for example, even at my age it’s still a lot easier for men than women to lose weight), especially lucky to still be healthy enough to do this. But I did want to share some of my thinking, such as it is.

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Good for you! Sounds like you found something that makes sense for you. Thanks for sharing it. Let us know if you come to more realizations about what clicks with you.

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This is good stuff. My own epiphany was this fairly simple, and probably obvious, series of thoughts on hunger.

Eat when you’re hungry. Don’t eat when you’re not hungry. If you are very hungry, don’t eat a lot, eat soon. Only eat enough to satisfy that hunger (i.e. reduce portions).

It’s not easy to keep to those rules, but I am confident they will at the least keep my weight down to manageable levels, if not quite to ‘ideal’ range.

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When I was suddenly no-warning diagnosed diabetic (A1C 10.8 yipes) I went through a very similar thought revolution.

I wasn’t as heavy / BMI-ful as the OP (200#, 28 BMI) but I was still quite aways from where I belonged for health. I’d never tried to diet in my life, so didn’t have the negative “carb counting = deprivation” associations which as the OP said are very real and a very real problem. Instead I had a lifetime of “eat whatever whenever how muchever with zero concern” to contend with. Which is a different problem, but is a problem.

As the OP says, I found that deciding you don’t want something is easier than thinking you want something but have decided not to act on that want. One is a positive choice, the other is negative self-torture.

I’ve been eating this way for over 13 years now. Less food, few snacks, carb nil (first years), no junk. It was almost effortless. And insanely rewarding. I had / have to pull my post-meal BGs 90 minutes after eating because I was back to baseline after 2 hours. Seeing via a BG reading exactly how well or badly my meal choices worked was really magic for me. The effort paid off in a visible result just 90 minutes later. Rapid feedback is a key to how humans learn. One of the reasons diabetes kills or cripples so many folks is all the upside is right now as you’re gobbling extra carbs, and the downsides are nebulous and decades later. Not if you’re checking. OP might try this and see if it clicks for them.

Having been stable on weight, BMI, and A1C for 12+ years now (145#, 21 BMI, 5.4 A1C) I can afford to eat carb-lite, not carb-zero. In many ways I find that harder. It’s easy to order extra vegetables instead of the baked potato with your steak. It’s far harder to order the potato, eat 3 bites, and leave the remaining 80+% sitting there all warm and wonderful looking. At least for me.

A decade ago, with a couple solid years of no-shit zero simple-carb (= white-anything or sweet anything) eating behind me, I found I’d mostly lost my taste for it. So when I added a little back into my diet, (nil simple carb is not an ideal lifetime diet either; some is better than none) it was easy to stop after a taste; desserts in particular were almost inedible: that much concentrated sweet tasted, (and mouth-felt) just goopy & nasty. I found I missed good bread and well-made potatoes, but desserts held no attraction.

Fast forward to living a few years of the “couple of bites” method, and that taste for simple carbs and even for less-sweet desserts has returned and now I find myself like a heavy drinker. I can always stop at 0, 1, or 2 drinks / bites. I can sometimes stop after 3 drinks / bites. But if I have 4 drinks / bites, I’m going on a bender and the bottle or plate of French fries or cheesecake will be gone when I’m done. For me that slope is very slippery and I warn the OP to be on the lookout for the same effect. Zero remains easier even after a decade of practice. For me.

Congrats on your journey! Your mind and your body will both be happier for each step you take along it.


Very well said. Thank you.

Way back when I was a kid and prone to ordering way too much food at restaurants or taking huge servings at home then not finishing them “But Daaad, I’m really really hungry”, Dad said “Being really hungry doesn’t mean you’re ready to eat more. It means you’re more ready to eat.” Somehow those words stuck here 60 years later. I hope they can stick with someone else out there too.

To which I’d add “Eat slowly, or at least with awareness. Chomp swallow gobble is easy, and time-efficient, but self-abusive. You’re doing self-care when you feed yourself. Enjoy it in all its elemental beauty.”

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I still recall a quote my sister posted on our refrigerator 50+ years ago:

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

mmm

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This can be incredibly difficult. Hungry is a brain condition, and the brain can, and does, lie.

My stomach can be full, and my brain still is asking for more food. “Just slow down” is often not a solution. It can be 30 minutes since I ate plenty, and my brain starts in with the hunger signals. I know that the hunger signals are not necessary, but hunger is a strong urge. My current BMI of 29 is me knowing the signals are a lie, and resisting as best I can.

If I only ate when I was hungry, I’d be much heavier.

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This is gold. It does seem to depend on one’s willingness to be hungry sometimes and not eat at that moment. As @echoreply notes, hunger isn’t an absolutely reliable indicator. If you have lost weight, for example, fat cells will send out chemicals that trigger hunger feelings. For most people, though, I think eating what you need instead of what you want for a while (maybe a few weeks) will tame that fake hunger pretty well.

This kind of thinking got me through some pretty strict dieting and exercise regimens in the past. But concern about being thin (and I used to be very thin) didn’t last past middle age as a motivator. Nowadays, I am very aware of how much better I feel just being not as heavy as I was last year. So I would substitute “not being heavy” for “being thin” in that quote.

I plan to stay at zero, with maybe three or four exceptions in a year – special occasions at a special restaurant, where we split a dessert. My husband is still diabetic and on Metformin, and (maybe because he is about half my size) he seems more sensitive to added sugar than I am. It’s good that we can reinforce each other in our approach to empty calories.

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I found that developing good muscle mass really helped me maintain a healthy weight. And when you’re really heavy, lifting weights is much less unpleasant than strenuous cardio (although for optimal health, you want to combine both). I always thought of exercise as a way to shift my body composition rather than a way to lose weight, and that really seemed to work.

Calorie restriction did work for me for a long time, but that’s because I have a somewhat obsessive tendency. Once I stopped counting calories and stopped exercising, the weight started creeping right back on. Changing your mindset, if you can do it, sounds much more manageable long-term.

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This can be really toxic though.

A goal like “being thin” and the idea that being thin will make you happy, are some abusive cultural messages, particularly for women and girls growing up surrounded by these messages and worse.

A focus on being healthy and active and capable of doing the things you want to do is much healthier.

As an example, I have never had the body type that anyone would call thin. I’m short and stocky. At my lowest weight/“skinniest,” I was very healthy, but still “overweight” by the dumb BMI charts. I did make the mistake of wanting to be thin, and it made me miss out on feeling so good about where I was – healthy, athletic, able to wear the clothes I wanted to and feel confident in them.

I think this is overlooked or just plain denied by people who have nice balanced brain chemistry. There are still some ways it can come into play even for them, though. For example, if you eat cheese puffs that melt in your mouth, your brain won’t recognize that as eating and shut off the hunger signal. It’s called “vanishing caloric density.” Some snack food makers want their snacks to do this, so people will keep eating the snacks.

And hunger is a primal need. For some people, cutting back on calories is like telling someone whose body is telling them that they are dangerously dehydrated to cut back on water. It might be possible in the short term, but without a change in brain chemistry, it won’t be sustainable.

That’s my epiphany. I’ve been trying to lose weight and get healthier for a couple of decades now, including a big push during the second year of covid where I was more determined than I ever have been to get in better shape. I was able to lose about 20 lbs, but after several months I plateaued and then slowly gained it back and then some.

Now I’ve asked my doctor for help. We’re going to be trying one combination drug that I was already taking one component of. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to find the requirements for getting semaglutide covered by my insurance, and we’ll work through them. I don’t have diabetes yet, but I just moved into the prediabetes category. I am having some other issues that I attribute specifically to my size/weight, like some new joint pains, getting out of breath much more easily, and a return of GERD symptoms that had gone away for a while.

I’m willing to try something that might be kind of onerous, because I really want to be healthier than I am right now.

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Oh yeah, I get that. This quote was from the 1970s (I actually think it may have said “skinny” instead of thin).

Anyway, my takeaway is that the advantages of being healthy far outweigh how good that glazed donut tastes.

mmm

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I am working my way through the same realizations and effort at a slower rate. Being homeless for a while didn’t help, because quality foods are not readily available and food stamps (EBT) don’t allow you to buy nice foods like prepared salad. EBT assumes you have a stove and refrigerator and can fix meals for yourself. (To heck with those who don’t have such access, they don’t try hard enough, is the appalling attitude that I felt.)

At any rate, I got a job, found an apartment that takes 3/4 of my take home pay to cover the cost of rent, and no longer qualify for EBT even though I can’t afford food so it’s back to the high-carb food shelves for me. Wah. Sorry for the whining, I’m trying to find a job that pays even $2 more an hour. I’m hopeful.

Still and all, I have learned much of what the OP says here is true. I’m down about 40 lbs from my highest weight. I was down further but homelessness caused me to gain about 20 of that back and I’ve since lost 10 of that. With the hours of the new job I come home ravenous most days and eat too much for dinner so I’m working on that bit.

I’ve learned that instead of meat/veg/starch with cheese in there somewhere, to just do protein/veg when I can. I do still slip up, sometimes out of necessity. In response to food scarcity/lack of money, I have overloaded my kitchen with food that was on sale at every opportunity so I do have too much food and am working my way through that stuff. It should get me through winter with the occasional run to the food shelf to look for fresh veg. Yay for onions and legumes. The first for making food tastier, the second for making food that sticks to my ribs but is still good for me.

Keep up the good work @Roderick_Femm and I’ll do the same.

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OP, really sorry but what was the epiphany?

I’m 100% convinced that a low carb diet is the right way to lose modern-lifestyle weight for most people. There are various quibbles over what low carb means but, regrettably, 97% won’t stick to it by any reasonable definition if they even try it at all.

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All the medical people who have had a hand in my care these last 13 years, so ~15 folks of various degrees and specialties say they very, very rarely encounter a patient able to do this. I’m not stealth bragging; for my weird mind & body this was easy once I knew how. Had it been hard for me, I’d have failed like the rest. I’m certainly plenty lazy & ineffectual in other facets of my life.

Because carb over-desire triggers diabetes (much simplified, and also given other catalytic circumstances), we can say in a metaphorical sense that diabetes the disease selects for victims who can’t fight it. Which is a shame.

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I never feel hungry, but I am never not ready to eat. I was diagnosed with diabetes nearly 20 years ago, put on metformin and prescribed something called a zone diet, which is basically a portion control regime. I lost about 40 lb (the metformin alone causes some weight loss; I think it is a milder version of wegovy) and stuck at 240. Then about 12 years ago, I decided to stop eating between meals and lost another 40 lb. You cannot go cold turkey on food, but you can on snacking and after a couple years you lose the between meals habit. Easier than giving up smoking (I did that 58 years ago). Now I have stuck at around 200 lb and my doctor told me to stop losing weight. My A1C dropped to 4.6% and they halved the metformin dose. It rose to 5.5% and that seems like a happy place. My physician DIL thinks I should stop it completely but I am reluctant.

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What is that process like, what’s an easy way to check if you’re just doing it for (sort of) amusement purposes?

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Here’s a bunch of 'em:

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I use an old-fashioned finger stick and drop of blood into a glucometer, which gives a reading of blood glucose level a couple seconds later. The equipment itself (meter + finger-poker) is cheap ($~$25) and lasts years.

There are two supplies needed: lancets and test strips. Which have to match the brand and style of meter & poker you have. Lancets themselves are cheap, 15 cents a pop roughly. Where they get you is on the test strips. Which are in fact pretty magic chemical lab test thingies, so some amount of expense is realistic. But the test strips are ~$1.50 each. Yipes.

So all-up, at full retail with no insurance it costs about $1.75 to do a single post meal test. It’s also useful to occasionally test right after getting up before eating to determine your baseline BG, but that’s something you can do for a couple days to get an initial average, then test only maybe monthly to see if anything is changing.

Having done this for a long time, I don’t need to test after meals I know and trust. Which are mostly those I make myself; restaurants or packaged food are famous for slipping excess cheap sugar and cheap carbs into the meals to make them bigger, most “satisfying” and tasty to carb junkies, and best of all, more profitable for them.

When I started out I would test after every meal. It’s the best way to quickly learn what is and isn’t bad eating. Now I only test after a cheat or a highly suspicious meal. Tonight I had a roast chicken breast with skin, a mound of sauteed spinach, and a dollop of pureed cualiflower. Plus some thickened chicken stock/broth. It was at a restuarant, but did not taste at all sweet. That’s about as safe a meal as there is. Not likely I’ll bother to test. I considered ordering a slice of ice cream cake to share with my wife. But we decided against; she tries to eat healthy too, but for different reasons. Had I eaten any of that evil stuff I’d certainly have tested.


If one has a diagnosis of diabetes and one has health insurance, then the price of testing equipment and supplies is often zero. Or at most a nominal co-pay so a single test costs you more like a nickel than $1.75. By and large the insurance companies have realized that for them, it’s cheap insurance to make testing cheap enough that people will do it regularly rather than save money not buying expensive test supplies and thereby letting their diabetes run unmonitored and therefore uncontrolled until they are blind, need their legs amputated, and need dialysis. All of which the insurance companies would be stuck paying for and they’d rather not.

But absent a diagnosis of diabetes (or maaaaybe pre-diabetes if that’s actually a real diagnosis), insurance won’t help.


If you’re just messing around or satisfying a curiosity / concern then …

All this stuff is OTC and the prices of various brands of stuff or from various sources vary a lot. The prices I quoted were from CVS retail for the name brand products I’ve been using for years. I understand there are now a bunch of cheaper options and sources, with Wal*Mart figuring prominently in that.

Bottom line: a curious onlooker could drop $50 on gear & supplies one time at e.g. Walmart’s pharmacy, and play with this for a couple weeks’ worth of meals.

Before you ask: with the modern tools, poking your finger to bleed is about as painful / aversive as getting a static electric shock off a doorknob. Usually much less, but a doorknob shock equivalent is about the worst case. The idea is much more disturbing than is the reality. IME/IMO YMMV.

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I have found some tricks that work for me and losing about 15% of my weight that I’d thought I’d share in particular:

1 - Eat foods that satisfy for long durations that I naturally eat in small portions. For me that’s meats. Doesn’t really matter if it’s beef, chicken, pork, lamb or other. I find meat very satisfying and find that I can cut back on the portions and still be satisfied for hours after. This really combats any tendency to snack or ‘look’ for food, which i tend to do if I eat foods that may be ‘healthy’ but not as satisfying.

2 - Cook the portion to eat (no leftovers), if I want to have more I have to make more, which I allow myself to do.

3 - Very quick weight training in the morning. That very quick part I feel is key. The general concept is to keep the body knowing that the muscles are needed, so maintain them by getting them into what I call the 80% of total capacity range every morning. The quick part is the phycological factor to keep it up, I have an absolute minimum which can be done in something like 3 minutes, then a more extended ‘normal routine’ which is more like 5-6 minutes. This is based on my concept that some exercise is better than none and I do feel some benefits from it. This quickness also negates the muscle soreness after effect of a longer duration strength training. Also if for some reason I get off the routine, I penalize myself by only allowing the minimum for some days, during which time I build up an appetite to really do more, but restrict myself from it till the penalty is over, after which it is highly motivating to get back to the routine.

4 - Lead an active lifestyle, and build that active lifestyle into one’s day. Things like not snagging the prime parking spot by the door, but even consider walking to the place.

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Congratulations! Losing weight is tough for a lot of people and I think takes a personalized approach to succeed. Glad you found the way that works for you.

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Yes, congratulations. I think saying “a lot of people” undersells the problem. It’s a large majority. I do agree that a personalized approach is more likely to help, but even there the success rates are low. I have no epiphany to share, as I still struggle with the problem myself. But I will share that I think it’s one of those things where the solution to the problem is simple but difficult. In other words, the problem isn’t that we lack understanding of what a healthy diet consists of. It’s that we lack knowledge of how to get large numbers of people to get on and stay on said healthy diet.